day 11 of 30

jedc nanowrmo2005
The Ark of 1984’s Future
Day 11 of 30

With the 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s huge financial success quite obvious, as it began to sell high quality clean abundant electrical power to several countries around the world; and payment for total recycling of some particularly noxious toxic industrial wastes; and even providing nutrients for food that did not come from the digestion tanks and sold to the RichElite who could afford it, the Tanfl political Corporation also decided to get into the space resource businesses.

Since the transportation fees that 3Musketeers charged for lift to GEO along their space escalator carousel were low, Tanfl had the makings of a free-fall hotel hauled up into GEO, and soon were getting a good return on their investment by visits from the RichElite who went there for the unique experience of staying a few days in free-fall and cozying up in view of the universe night sky from GEO.

Although for quite different reasons, both Tanfl and 3Musketeers wanted those big cities built in GEO, to provide living space for the earth’s peoples. The escalator carousel was running at capacity already, and would be more needed just to lift people and their household belongings to GEO, if there were new homes there for them to live in comfortably. The political complexities ongoing in Africa had so far precluded the construction of a second escalator connecting there, so the decision was made to make the Moon the primary source for materials for constructing the ring of Stanford Torus type cities around the Earth in GEO. The RichElite of Tanfl Political Corporation were well educated already, although they did not have much real job experience as there was little for most of them to do in their part of the city. So Tanfl decided to take on the job of providing lunar-sourced components for the construction of the primary structure of the Stanford Torus cities in GEO. Clearly, there was lots of money to be made by creating and selling that real estate in GEO, where people could live in well designed total recycling mode, and even create pristine environments for re-created nature settings, presumably to be used as seed stock for replanting a cleaned-up earth surface. This became the dream not only of 3Musketeers but of most of Tanfl people too, to create this new kind of Ark to re-seed the renewed earth with life in future wholesomeness.

The Leroy Brown Society part of Tanfl had its secret other purpose, of course. Yet it too needed that ring of cities built up there, and as quickly as possible. So, essentially everybody was united to this task.

There was to be much robotic assistance involved with the mining, materials processing, and subassembly manufacture, all to be ready to be roboticly plugged together to form the hollow wheel shell for each 2-mile-diameter Stanford Torus city, to eventually be home for 10,000 people each, much as the earlier 1976 design intended for use in L-5 envisioned. So Tanfl converted over most of its manufacturing facilities in 3Musketeers part of the city, to the design, prototyping, manufacture of components for those wide-variety robotic assistants to be used in space and on the lunar surface.

Getting those subassemblies from the Moon to GEO was another task yet to be solved. A lunar escalator carousel could only loop around the Moon from its farside to only as high as L-1 without going into a structural mode involving tensile stress in the lunar-stationary part of the structure. The stationkeeping tasks for catchers involved in the O’Neil type mass driver materials delivery from the lunar surface had not yet been resolved. An escalator carousel anchored to the lunar surface on the earthward side of the Moon, would be able to reach to an altitude higher above the Moon, but not beyond the balance point where the centrifugal force from the moon’s orbit around the earth equaled the amplitude of the combined earth and Moon gravity at that point, without the structure needing to use tensile strength of its stationary track materials.

So the decision was made to build an anchored lunar tether space elevator through L-1 (the balance point between the Earth and the Moon), and build facilities at L-1 for fabrication of the larger subassemblies there in free-fall balance between the Earth’s and Moon’s gravitation pull forces. From there, the large subassemblies wold ride on down toward the Earth, carried on captive tractors that electromagnetically braked along the tracks attached to the tapered fiberglass tether, which would convert its kinetic energy into electrical energy poured into the conductive tracks, which would then be conducted over the tracks to the lunar side of the tether, to assist in raising up the materials for more manufacturing at L-1. Reaction engined powered freighters from GEO would rendezvous with the subassemblies as the were released from the tether’s captive tractors, and the freighter would then use rocket power to deliver the subassembly to the ongoing construction site in GEO.

The whole task seemed enormous, yet doable in the immense space environment. There would need to be an ongoing construction of those space cities in GEO of huge proportions. To get the major part of the world population up there within 20 years, the space carousel escalator would need to move a million people a day, with their cherished belongings, up to GEO; and the lunar-sourced construction of the basic cities for their homes would need to be built at the same rate of a million homes per day. But robots could be built in space of almost any huge size, and the energy pouring out from the Sun up there was ever ongoing, capturable to the task of powering those robotic construction systems.

Transporting a million people a day from all over the world, to be funneled into the Ecuadorian Andes tunnel embarkation port to GEO, was also quite a task, especially to a world which had been energy starved for decades prior to the startup of the escalator-emplaced solar power satellites. Now abundant clean energy was returning to sites all around the world, yet the devices that could use that electrical power often had been discarded or simply worn out, and so they too had to be manufactured.

Slowly, the world began to look again like an energy-wealthy world, but it took time to do so.


There was too much going on that was new and unfamiliar to people, all this manufacturing of new kinds of things for use in space, and the doings out there, some even beyond GEO. The making of unfamiliar objects, from the tiny “3 mm sliding armature segments” to the curved panels with integral rib sections that fit together that made a hollow wheel two miles across, and inside was 600 feet across, were not the arenas of thought, even a decade before. There was a lot of sending back of pieces that did not fit together correctly, for example. Two of those huge panels had collided during assembly, bending both of them beyond any way they knew how to repair, up there in free fall without a solid place to stand and a hard vacuum awaiting nearby. So they had no way to send them back either, so they were set aside until they could be sawn up into small enough pieces to go through the solar powered total recycler.

The Holopresence monitor was ever a way to intimately check how things were going, as its special “paint” was now used on all things in the system. Yet even it was not adequate for the time when a steering thruster ran out of fuel as a freighter was bringing a load of panels from the lunar plants to GEO. It was quickly clear that a collision was going to take place, but there was no rocket fuel where needed at the moment, so all the Holopresence could do was show the rapidly new inevitability. It showed the projected trajectory, it was going to ram one of the full sized solar power satellites in GEO which was beaming power to a customer nation down below. A message was sent to that nation to sound alarms and shut down machines and vehicles that depended on electric power, open doors that would only open electrically; little of it got noticed in time, however. The freighter with its loads of panels rammed the power sat and bounced off, both shedding fragments and knocked out of orbit, headed toward the ground. Down on the ground, suddenly a nation found itself without power to do much of anything. Worse, the trajectories of the freighter and the ruined solar power satellite were projected as best possible given their ragged shapes and tumbling. Their meteoric fireballs were visible far away as they plunged to ground on the nightside of the planet. They hit at the eastern shore of Brazil near the Equator, one on land and the other just offshore, one creating a local tidal wave and the other a mushroom cloud fireball, setting the jungle on fire for miles around the impact crater.

Reparations to Brazil and its people took a chunk of what would have been profits. But most of all it clearly showed the problems of huge things being built up there, which eventually will surely reach ground, if only in hundreds of thousands of years. How to deal with that problem? Preventing orbital decay was the new focus of attention; some push on a solidly connected ring all around the planet in GEO could couple some of earth’s rotational energy to maintain the angular velocity of the habitat ring, yet that ring would be flexible, and so orbital decay of the cities far from the escalator’s site had to be prevented more directly, by a bit of reaction motor thrust, very small but requiring loss of a tiny bit of mass in doing so. Hundreds of thousands of years would use up a lot of mass, however, and besides, the reaction thrust system mechanisms surely would not work autonomously that long, none of them failing. Would someday in the far distant future, all their huge cities in space, the big power satellites and total recycling plants, all come tumbling down on a sleepy unsuspecting earth all around the equator? Would it spread a dust storm far and wide, disrupting the weather system like a huge volcano and worse? These things were pondered mostly by the 3Musketeers people, since the Tanfl people only considered the cost of things that get dropped in the very near future.

Would it be wise to design the big structures in GEO to break up and pulverize high in the atmosphere, becoming dust and small fragments to cloud the world’s air; or would it be better to design them to stay mostly in a solid lump that would go wham and make a crater, throwing up dirt into the air along with fragments of the impacting machine?

They finally settled on a design philosophy that drew from living things, ones that continuously had circulating nutrients, which as in the human body rebuilds nearly all cells over once every seven years. If all the space cities and power plants, everything up there, were designed to be continually taken apart and rebuilt over and over again, the designs could be made better with experience over time, and if a time came to abandon the ring of cities, then they could be taken apart bit by bit and brought down the escalator gently and rationally stacked out of the way.

So a major redesign was begun, to implement this new basic philosophy of continual take apart in place and rebuilding on the spot, bit by bit, on and on. It was full structural maintenance, requiring that at times things be moved out of one area to another. Eventually it was decided that not all things would need to be taken apart every so many years, if it was still certainly in serviceable shape, yet all parts had to be capable of being taken apart and taken to the earth’s surface gently and intelligently.